Solo performance from The Ex vocalist Arnold de Boer deploying guitar and sampler for an almighty bout of crazily high energy songs - urgent lyrics over guitar, roughshod beats and grimy bass lines. Joyfully obstinate, wonderfully bonkers.

"One guy stands playing his guitar like he’s trying to saw it in half with his bare hands, the other bashes at the vocoding keyboard devices like he wants them to explode, and they end up making one almighty racket that could be called ‘dance’ music. If you happen to dance like a malfunctioning washing machine, that is. Ace." Drowned in Sound

"It's incredibly bonkers, that's for sure, but it's so bloody energetic, so bull headed and so schizophrenic in its approach to crafting a tune that you simply can't fail to be impressed by it...The results are astonishing." Incendiary Magazine





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DEAD DAYS BEYOND HELP

Dead Days Beyond Help are Alex Ward (guitar/vocals) and Jem Doulton (drums). They formed in 2006 and played their first show in February 2007. Alex Ward initially came to attention in free improvisation circles for his work as a clarinettist with the likes of Derek Bailey and Eugene Chadbourne, while his interests in rock music and composition first became apparent with the band Camp Blackfoot. His guitar playing has been featured with improv power-trio N.E.W. (with Steve Noble and John Edwards), and in recent collaborations at Cafe Oto with such avant-rock luminaries as Tatsuya Yoshida, Shoji Hano and Weasel Walter.

Dead Days Beyond Help debut album "Access Denied!" (Copepod, 2009) featured a set of 9 compositions by Ward, ranging from intricate and breakneck instrumentals to structurally-straightforward but emotionally scouring song material; while a subsequent limited edition release "The Verbing" (Copepod, 2011) showcased the duo's totally improvised work. Since then, a deluge of new material written jointly by Ward and Doulton has taken DDBH's music far further into uncharted waters, simultaneously more epic and more mind-scramblingly dense. Their live performances feature a wholly unpredictable mix of all these elements, spontaneously balanced by the two musicians without use of a set-list. Veering from violent dissonance to sweeping melancholy, hyper-composed precision to pure improvised abandon, and equally likely to leap at any moment into a wall of flattening noise or the most direct country song, DDBH bypass the pitfalls of irony and the obstacle course of genre by the simple guiding principle: intensity-at-all-costs.

"formidably knotty, complex music which avoids the dry geekiness of US math rock while beating it hands down in terms of intensity and fluidity... Ward’s guitar work leaps between metallic crunch, Fripp-esque tangle and Chadbourne choogle with astounding energy and precision, while Doulton’s drumming swings with commensurate joy and fury" - The Wire.

"Dead Days Beyond Help treat music as something between a four-dimensional sandbox and a hiking trip through the human psyche" - The Dreaded Press.